Georges Perec: A Players Manual

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Georges Perec: A Player’s Manual This chapter explores the well-established playfulness of Perec’s work, which is exemplified in Life: A User’s Manual. Perec himself acknowledged that the ludic was one of the four modes of inquiry he used in his writing. 1 He was also aware of the profound ambiguity of the role of play in culture and cultural expression,2 which was a central theme in his novel W, or Memories of a Childhood that focused on the dark side of the competitive spirit fostered in elite sports.3 McKenzie Wark has previously drawn a strong connection between the critique of play voiced by Perec in W and some of the more problematic elements found in digital game play.4 Life a user’s manual approaches the ludic more benevolently, and is a culmination of Perec’s own experiences and experimentation with play, games, rules, creativity, and constraints. No research on Perec’s writing can proceed without covering ground opened for exploration by David Bellos’s excellent biography George Perec: A life in words. But new relations can be uncovered in existing data by pushing a pin through a fresh hole provided it does not find only notches. Bellos establishes that play and games have an important place in Perec’s life and works, but this chapter reshuffles and deals the cards anew, and at stake is appreciating the role of play in relation to both constraint and creativity in his work. This examination proceeds by fleshing out the context in which his attentiveness to the ludic arose. While the themes of Life a user’s manual capture something of the intellectual zeitgeist of 1970s France, Perec’s personal interest in the ludic was drawn from multiple experiences and influences throughout his life, from his childhood, from his association with OuLiPo, and from his day job as an archivist. Following this the chapter looks closely at the processes that Perec used while writing Life a user’s manual and how these processes resonate with the novel’s theme of fragmentation. Perec’s zeitgeist During the period that Perec was an active and prominent writer several well-known scholars shared his concern with the rapid changing French lifestyle in the post-World War II period. Connections between concerns of Roland Barthes, Maurice Blanchot, Michel de Certeau and Henri Lefebvre and Perec’s work have been extensively mapped.5 These scholars are linked with Perec through a concern with the everyday, which was undergoing substantial change at multiple levels in the decades following the end of World War Two, such as the reorganisation of rural workforces into ‘new towns,’6 the growth of ‘post-industrial’ forms of labour,7 and the increasing prevalence of advertising in public and private spaces.8 In the early to mid-1970s (when Perec was writing Life: A

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User’s Manual) information technologies were in the process of being introduced to many industries and were on their way to becoming the norm. In the forty years or so since the novel was first published computers have moved from the tragic-comic oddities of large bureaucracies, as found in the story of the Réols, to becoming genuinely pervasive and ubiquitous. Terms like Lefebvre’s ‘Bureaucratic Society of Controlled Consumption,’ even Touraine’s more enduring ‘Post-Industrial Society’ have given way over the years to a new understanding of the centrality of information technology in everyday life. While the logic of contemporary culture may be described as ‘algorithmic,’9 ‘computational,’10 or ‘control,’11 the core concern is the role of pervasive information technologies in shaping how information and data are managed and knowledge is formed. Perec’s approach to writing that makes use of rules and play, offers insight into an early phase of what has become the dominant technological culture. The personal connection between Perec and Lefebvre is particularly well established. There is strong documentation of their association from 1958 up until 1972.12 Lefebvre was one of Perec’s ‘early mentors,’13 he began to read anthropology on the advice of Lefebvre after an extended visit to his house in Navarrenex in 1958.14 Later, Lefebvre used his influence to get Perec a market research position.15 However, Perec was hardly reverent towards Lefebvre, at one time describing him as a ‘sad clown’ in his personal correspondence.16 Regardless of the subtleties of their relationship, there is also a clear connection between Perec’s and Lefebvre’s intellectual projects, which are both rooted in the everyday and quotidian. In the work of Henri Lefebvre this postwar transformation of France into the ‘bureaucratic society of controlled consumption’ was facilitated by the enhanced technological capacity of the centrally organised government bureaucracy and the colonization of everyday life by new technology. Lefebvre perceived an approaching pivotal point where computers and cybernetic thinking shifted from supporting production and administration and would begin to ‘alter social existence.’ His work from the time when Life: A User’s Manual was first published— particularly Everyday Life in the Modern World and Critique of Everyday Life (Volume three): From Modernity to Modernism—contains explicit critiques of technological cultures. Lefebvre was particularly concerned with how information technologies produced a monopoly on knowledge which was then being used to make decision which did not account for the lived experiences and knowledges of individuals and communities.17 Through addressing the everyday lives of the inhabitants of an apartment, Life: A User’s Manual, examines the changes in lived experience that took place during the twentieth century.

From play to work: Perec, constrained writing, and the database 2

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Play had an important role in Perec’s family life. While he lost his parents at an early age, he knew of his father’s love of cards and gambling from his paternal aunt and adoptive mother, Esther Bienenfeld.18 Card games, had been an important part of the Bienenfeld and Perec family gatherings,19 and also served a significant function in the pearl trading business of his adoptive father David Bienenfeld.20 The young Perec also found that he had a passion for games and play like his father, although he was prone more to losing himself in play and ignoring his other responsibilities (like writing), than he was to gambling. As an adult, Perec often made mention of his passion for cards, jigsaw puzzles, and board games like Monopoly, and Scrabble in his unpublished writings and notes.21 In his early days as a student of History at the Sorbonne (1955-1956) he developed an ‘obsession’ with pinball—which were known colloquially as flippers or tilts—that came to border on ‘addiction.’22 It was during this period fascination with tilts that he developed, and began to use, a ludic metaphor to describe his life: Georges would often hold forth mock-philosophically that his life could be compared to the brief and violent path of a ball in a tilt, rejected unpredictably by one blinking spring-loaded pin after another before plunging – to soon! – into the black hole where all balls must eventually come to rest.23 The injuries that he acquired during these binges with pinball—‘blisters on his button fingers and sores on his thumbs’ as well as ‘headaches’—helped him to ignore the other forms of pain in his life.24 Perec’s metaphor for life through tilts emphasizes the random and senseless, even brutal elements of play he explores in W, or the memory of a childhood. As he developed as a writer this metaphor shifted from a ham-fisted player battering a mechanically propelled ball into a hole, to a sophisticated algorithm designed to combine different fragments, objects and images in unusual ways. As he drifted away from study into a more bohemian, intellectual lifestyle Perec cultivated a group of friends, dubbed the ‘magnetic bunch,’ who shared his passion for games and jigsaw puzzles.25 But despite his clear enjoyment, Perec was not usually the outstanding champion: Perec was a player from the start, and could lose himself totally in a game of poker, belote, le barbu, bridge, Scrabble, Monopoly, or patience. Oddly enough, he was never more than a mediocre player of any of these games, and often lost to friends with more guile, or more

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skill, or perhaps just more brains. He was never much of a cheater, except when playing against himself.26 His obsession with playing games sometimes led to friction among the group.27 But it was his preoccupation with the Japanese board game Go that raised the concern of his closest confidants. Under Perec’s influence Go had become the game that was played among his circle in 1968.28 During that year Perec, with his friends Jacques Roubaud and Pierre Lusson, wrote a book on Go: Traité invitant à la découverte de l’art subtil du go. During this time, Perec’s lover Suzanne Lipinska, became concerned that playing and writing about Go was distracting Perec from his goal of writing one page per day on his current manuscript.29 Go was more than just a distraction. In chapter 94 ‘On the Stairs, 12’ of Life: A user’s manual, the Go position ‘Ko’ is listed as one of the items found on the staircase of 11 Rue Simon-Crubellier over the years; in the form of ‘seven marble lozenges, four black and three white.’30 The rule of Ko overrides the typical rules for the placement of Go pieces, by preventing a stalemate where the exchange of pieces can continue indefinitely. As an intervention designed to break a deadlock, Ko is particularly evocative considering that the book Perec wrote with Lusson and Roubaud argues that playing Go can be compared to writing. If Go can be compared to writing, then a variation in the rules like Ko suggests that it is appropriate to ‘break’ or change the rules, if that is necessary to proceed. The connection that was made between Go and writing was originally attributed to Roubaud, but it was adopted by Perec after the collaboration.31 For Perec, employing rules to constrain writing was not simply about following rules and discovering where that would take him, it was also about developing new rules that refined the process and moved him onto new challenges, rather than rehearsing and repeating the same old moves. Making meta-rules for how to write, became almost important as writing itself, and became an increasingly important part of the creativity and innovation in his writing. In 1965, Georges Perec’s began a life-long association with OuLiPo or Ouvroir de Littérature Potentielle (Workshop for Potential Literature). He was introduced to their ideas by his friend Jacques Roubaud, who had become an official member of OuLiPo in 1965, during the time they spent together at a writer’s retreat at the Moulin d’Andé. OuLiPo met regularly in Paris from 1960 and were headed by Raymond Queneau, together the group members conducted an exhaustive investigation of existing formal languages—mathematics, logic, computer science and chess—and how they might be used in poetry, and developed and explored various techniques of constrained

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writing. Constrained writing, involved writing according to particular set rules, which while limiting also inspired novel approaches and ideas. While his interest in play and experimental writing predated his involvement with OuLiPo,32 Perec’s involvement in the group helped him to develop his interest in rules for writing and provided him with a strong and supportive intellectual context to explore his interest in games and play through literature. Play became increasingly central to Perec’s work after the publication of his first novel Things: A Story of the Sixties in 1965, although had made reference to writing as a king of game as far back as the 1950s. By 1967, when Perec was working on A void, he was already insisting on a ludic approach to writing.33 This novel was famously written without once using the letter ‘e,’ a writing constraint that had begun as a word game that Perec played with his friends from 1967 onwards, which he also hoped would help him to overcome writer’s block.34 Perec’s commitment to using constraints was peculiar; he was also fascinated by the notion that these constraints could be selectively ignored, that he could judiciously cheat against his own self-imposed rules.35 While some of his earlier novels adhered more clearly to the internal logics of the constraints he imposed on his writing, Life: A user’s manual demonstrates a more playful relationship to the technique. While Perec was fascinated by ‘writing with rules and with the exhaustive completion of self-devised schemes and grids,’ he always sought to ‘communicate a human experience of the world’ through this process.36 By playing with the rules he imposed, Perec explored the dominant logic of the ‘bureaucratic society of controlled consumption’ by demonstrating how space for life and lived experience was carved out from within its structure of directives and procedures. From 1961-1978 Perec worked for a large neurophysiology research laboratory in Paris as a documentaliste (archivist). His first role was to design an indexing system for the specialized scientific journals that the laboratory subscribed to. He quickly developed a fascination for indexing systems, and ‘Flambo,’ the system of indexing he implemented was greatly admired by his scientific colleagues.37 In 1965 his laboratory moved to a larger premises and Perec was tasked with developing a larger, more elaborate database, which he called ‘Peekaboo.’ The new database included a few ludic touches, one index card described his novel Things: A story of the sixties and he often introduced humorous errors into bibliographies and texts he was working on for his scientific colleagues.38 Perec was already thinking about how to apply knowledge and skill he had for database design to explore fiction in a playful manner. It appears he was reasonably invested in experimenting with this disruptive playfulness, because while his colleagues took his antics with good humour, having to remove glitches he had deliberately introduced took him away from his very precious

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writing time.39 Playing around with databases, opened new ground for Perec and the playful techniques he developed while he has working as an archivist formed a basis for some of his subsequent writing, including Life a user’s manual. In late 1968 Perec was commissioned by the Computing Service of the Humanities Research Centre in Paris, to ‘explore literary potential of the algorithm’ (Bellos 1993, 409).40 Perec’s task was to turn an algorithm, in the form of a flow chart that represented the steps to be taken in order to obtain a pay raise by a lowly member of a large bureaucracy. This was eventually published in 1968 as the art and craft of approaching your head of department to submit a request for a raise, and subsequently a revised version of the literary algorithm found its way into Life a User’s Manual. Chapter 98, ‘Réol, 2’ describes the tragic-comic tale of Maurice and Louise Réol, and Maurice’s year-long efforts to secure a raise in the face of crippling household debts.41 This successful experiment in literary computing ironically presages the outmoding of Perec’s archival skills. By 1975 Perec’s role as a virtuoso index card database designer and manager had become rather precarious.42 By this time newer databases were managed using computers, and his once lauded Peekaboo system became old-fashioned. Perec flat-out refused to undergo re-training as a computer data-base operator, and as he had tenure at the laboratory as an archivist was able to ignore his colleagues pressure on him to resign, still it created ‘an awkward, irksome stalemate.’43 Indeed, this stalemate shaped Perec’s everyday experience while he was writing the manuscript for Life a User’s Manual, and continued until he was able to retire and write full-time in 1978 following the success of the novel. Play had an important role in Perec’s life. Not just as a memory from his childhood. Play remained an important part of his leisure activities as an adult. At first it was a method of escapism or avoidance, but through the influence of OuLiPo he also began to experiment with playful forms or writing through the use of constraints or rules that shaped how or what he could write. During the course of his day job Perec played with the organization of databases, until computers replaced the index card systems that he had helped design. These experiences frame the role of the ludic in Life a user’s manual, which suggests even within set rules and parameters play can introduce expression and events that are creative and novel.

Playing Life a user’s manual In Life: A user’s manual Perec’s writing process became enmeshed with the writing constraints. Working within and playing with constraints was part of his process of writing, and in the novel this 6

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process parallels the struggles of a key character of the book Percival Bartlebooth, who has devised a programmatic schedule to his life designed around the regular completion of jigsaw puzzles. To this end he has squandered a fortune build over generations of his ancestors, and shaped the lives of many people in his apartment building 11 Rue Simon-Crubellier. Various neighbours are in Bartlebooth’s employ: his assistant Smauft, who accompanied him on his travels around the globe to paint the watercolours which are made into jigsaw puzzles; Morellet, the chemist that restored the completed puzzles to a single blank canvas; Madame Hourcade, who made the puzzle boxes; and Valène, the artist that taught Bartlebooth how to paint. The most important employee is Gaspard Winckler, Bartlebooth’s nemesis, who is employed to create a series of five-hundred 750-piece jigsaw puzzles. Bartlebooth’s project is a well-kept secret that no-one outside his employ has an inkling of, aside from Rorschach, the television producer who seeks to make the project into material for a television series. Play, games, and toys feature strongly in Life a user’s manual. They appear in in myriad forms in the contents of the rooms of the apartment building, even in the artworks on the walls.44 The many of the inhabitants of 11 Rue Simon-Crubellier play games, David Marcia fritters away his profits on Roulette,45 Gaspard Winckler and the chemist Morellet play backgammon every evening in Madame Riri’s café, before dining together (if their tempers didn’t get the better of them),46 and the Danglar’s play an erotic game, where each challenges the other to steal a luxury item from a high society event and are ‘rewarded or punished according to his or her success or failure.’47 But the key ludic motif in the novel is the jigsaw puzzle, which represents both the fragmentation of experience and the impossibility of producing totalizing forms of knowledge. The jigsaw puzzle is an unusual literary motif, an activity that seems evoke an experience far removed both from the processes of reading and writing. However, as Perec notes in the preamble to the novel, which examines the art of jigsaw puzzles: ‘despite appearances, puzzling is not a solitary game, every move the puzzler makes, the puzzle-maker has made before.’ This passage on jigsaws is later repeated in Chapter 44 ‘Winckler, 2.’48 This emphasizes the importance of the jigsaw puzzle as a framing device for the novel, but also allows the reader, through repetition to reevaluate their understanding at a point in the novel where they have seen enough fragmentary pieces of narrative to recognize the significance of the tract on jigsaws. It is not simply a thoughtful meditation on jigsaw puzzles, but also a guide on how to navigate the novel. If the chapters of Life a user’s manual are the pieces of the puzzle, then the preamble is the picture on the box. A picture

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that helps us align the pieces, but also draws us into making mistakes by playing with our expectations (‘is that piece sky, or water?’). The practice of completing puzzles was originally a children’s pastime. At first they were known as ‘dissected maps,’ although puzzle had become used to describe these objects as early as 1858. The dissected map has its origins in 18th-century Britain.49 Although conceived in a narrow didactic sense, often aimed at educating children about the geography of the British Empire they quickly became a popular pastime among middle-class and wealthier children (and their families), so much so, that by 1814 when mentioned in passing in Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park they are an everyday, familiar childhood item.50 Wooded puzzles were made by skilled artisans they required multistep manufacture which included printing cutting, and colouring the pieces, as well as the design and construction of decorated wooden boxes for the pieces.51 Perec devotes several passages in the novel to discussing the processes of devising Bartlebooth’s puzzles, itemizing the inventory of Winckler’s workshop and describing some of his other craft projects. He highlights the puzzle maker’s skill, emphasizing that he is very much the author of the project, despite him working within the rules set by Bartlebooth. Perec hones in on specificity of the various jigsaw puzzle-pieces, intimately describing various standard shapes, and noting how Winckler preferred also to include unique shapes: ‘a python, a mountain cat, and two fully formed elephants, one of the African (longeared) variety, the other Indian, or a Charlie Chaplin.’52 Samuel Taylor Coleridge uses the metaphor of assembling a jigsaw to describe the process of building an image from the lines of Wordsworth’s poetry. He writes: It seems to be like taking the pieces of a dissected map out of its box. We first look at one part, and then at another, then join and dovetail them; and when the successive acts of attention have been completed, there is a retrogressive effort of mind to behold it as a whole (1921, 100).53 While the jigsaw and jigsaw pieces represent fragmentation, the process of solving a jigsaw puzzle has long been used a metaphor for realising the complete picture, an act of making sense of the fragments by joining them together through observation, trial and error and the implementation of set rules (‘find the corners and edges first,’ ‘put the pieces with blue in them together’). In Life a user’s manual, the puzzle is deliberately incomplete.

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The structure of the book’s ninety-nine chapters is also elaborated through a game-like mechanism. Each chapter focuses on describing one room and its contents and inhabitants, both past and present. 11 Rue Simon-Crubellier has ten levels (including a basement, and two attic levels under the eaves of the roof) and Perec sets out to describe ten rooms from each of the ten levels, which he maps out as a ten-by-ten grid.54 He then proceeds to move around the grid of rooms, like a knight on a (extra-large) chessboard. By visiting each room once, Perec replicates a classic chess puzzle ‘The Knight’s Tour,’ using the puzzle to structure his novel. The tour of the knight in Life a user’s manual is unfinished, leaving one room unvisited. This incomplete execution is deliberate and creates a structural resonance with a key theme of the novel: fragmentation represented through the jigsaw piece and Bartlebooth’s incomplete jigsaw puzzle (and project) which demonstrates the flaws of topdown, totalizing knowledge. Perec used an algorithm to set parameters over what would be included in each of the room. The algorithm was used to dictate which items from forty-two lists were to be included in each chapter. Following experimentation with algorithms in his work on the short film Les Lieux d'une fuguee (1975), he employed a mathematician to develop a suitable algorithm.55 Perec had employed an astonishing and challenging variety of constraints in his writing by the time he began work on Life a user’s manual, but this was the first time he used an algorithmic system for generating content prompts, this demonstrated an implementation in his practices of his long established ambition to employ constrained writing in a manner that made a storytelling machine.56 Gaspard Winckler, the toymaker is a crucial figure in Life a user’s manual. He turns out to be an extremely skilled jigsaw puzzle designer, who worked traps and perceptual illusions into the jigsaw puzzles he made that played upon the expectations that Bartlebooth had developed over the previous puzzles he had completed. Despite working on the puzzle ‘methodically,’ with the ‘Cartesian rigour’ of a ‘chess player,’ ‘each of Winckler’s puzzles was a new, unique, and irreplaceable adventure for Bartlebooth.’57 Winckler, a mysterious character who also appears in the more clearly autobiographical W, memories of a childhood, is Perec’s own autobiographical doppelganger who stands in for him as the mastermind behind the puzzle of Life a user’s manual. In the competition between Winckler and Bartlebooth, the puzzle maker bests his employer. Both because Winckler’s puzzles are unexpectedly difficult, forcing Bartlebooth to proceed more slowly that his schedule had anticipated, and also because he gradually lost his sight, making him fall even further behind in his schedule. Ultimately, Bartlebooth dies without completing his goal. What Bartlebooth had hoped to achieve through the project remains unclear. Certainly he outlined a

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course of activity that amounted to a life’s work, but the activities themselves seem purposeless. The secrecy of the project, and as he each fortnight tried to recreate from memory a landscape he had painted at least twenty years before suggests that it had a deeply personal meaning for Bartlebooth. In the execution of the process of completing the puzzle, it is apparent that he was immersed in a programmatic logic which stems from the ‘desire to tabulate, catalog, classify, and order the world into meaningful hierarchies.’58 It is Winckler disruption of this process that set the two at odds with each other. This disruption signals the relationship between the author, Perec as the puzzle master and the reader, a defeated Bartlebooth vainly trying to construct a narrative according to a plan dictated by a flawed logic. What is important is not the whole, the merely adequate watercolours, which Bartlebooth sought to have destroyed on completion. What matters are the jigsaw pieces, the fragments lovingly crafted by Winckler as puzzle pieces and by Perec as chapters. Life, Perec suggests is made from fragments of memory and experience and we assemble them according to rules that are our own. Perec’s biographer David Bellos recounts an interview with Elizabeth “Babette” Mangolte, one of his dynamic circle of card-playing, jigsaw-puzzling intellectuals: ‘“We were quite clear on the distinction between puzzles and cards games in those days,” recalls Babette. “One was a game of chance, the other a pursuit based on skill.”’59 Jigsaws being the skilled activity, and in Life a user’s manual Perec expresses his admiration less for the player who completes the puzzle, and more towards the master of the craft of puzzle making—Gaspard Winckler. The ‘game’ of Life a user’s manual is described by David Bellos as taking place between Bartlebooth, Valème and Winckler,60 but another game is also taking place between Perec and the reader. In a 1978 interview with Jacqueline Piatier, published in Le Monde, he sates: ‘Writing a novel is not like narrating something related directly to the real world. It’s a matter of establishing a game between reader and writer.’61 Ultimately Bartlebooth fails at this game because he cannot reincorporate the fragments according to his programme. Perec, however, celebrates the failures within his own system by leaving the Knight’s Tour through the apartment building deliberately incomplete. Valème also fails in his attempt to reassemble the fragments of 11 Rue Simon-Crubellier by creating a painting which shows the life of the entire building at one moment.62 When discovered, unfinished after his death, the ‘canvas was practically blank: a few charcoal lines had been carefully drawn, dividing it into regulars square boxes, the sketch of a crosssection of a block of flats which no figure, now, would ever come to inhabit.’63 No-one was able to present life as a totality, not the rich dilettante, the poor artist, or even Perec himself. The novel is a celebration of the impossibility of knowing or presenting life as anything other than fragments.

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Conclusion Several elements of Perec’s life suggest a special place for play in his work. His own, well documented interest in games and puzzles, which was later shaped and turned towards literature and work through his involvement with OuLiPo and his employment as a database designer and archivist. This provides a backdrop for understanding the centrality of play in Life a user’s manual which deploys play as a key metaphor that frames and organizes both the process through which the novel was written and its finished form. The novel contrasts the application of organizing rules to the fragmentary experience of everyday life, with lived experience. This is exemplified by how Bartlebooth organizing the unique pieces of each jigsaw puzzle in the same way every fortnight, and by the random leaps of the Knight’s Tour which take the reader through the vivid and evocative everyday lives of the building’s inhabitants, both past and present. Written at a tipping point between the computer being largely confined to government and a few industries and becoming an everyday workplace and domestic appliance, Life a user’s manual demonstrates how knowledge of everyday life is necessarily incomplete if it is taken outside of the realm of lived experience. This issue endures, however, in our contemporary ‘datafied’ world. Information technology infrastructures now collect massive amounts of data of a variety of qualities from consumer preferences to physical locations through more or less explicit surveillance and selfmonitoring. Big data, in its worst excesses, can be taken to represent a novel epistemology that agglomerates fragmentary data which in the past may have been ignored. Life a user’s manual would insist that, rather, such data is incomplete. Notes 1

Michael Sheringham, Everyday life: Theories and practices from Surrealism to the present (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), p. 248. 2 See: Brian Sutton-Smith, The ambiguity of play (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997). 3 See: Johan Huizinga, Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play-Element In Culture (Boston: Beacon Press, 1955). 4 McKenzie Wark, Gamer Theory (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2006), p. 116; McKenzie Wark, Telethesia: Communication, culture and class (Malden: Polity, 2012), p. 91. 5 Michael. Sheringham, ‘Attending to the everyday: Blanchot, Lefebvre, Certeau, Perec,’ French Studies 54(2), 2000, p. 187-199. See also: David Bellos, Georges Perec: A life in words (Boston: David R. Godine, 1993), p. 292; Michael. Sheringham, ‘The project and the everyday: Françios Bon’s experiments with attention,’ in Johnnie Gratton and Michael Sheringham (eds). The Art of the Project: Projects and Experiments in Modern French Culture (New York: Berghahn, 2005), p. 188-203; Sheringham, Everyday life, p. 248. 6 Henri Lefebvre, Introduction to Modernity: Twelve preludes September 1959-May 1961, Trans. John Moore (London: Verso, 1995). 7 Alain Touraine, The post-industrial society (New York: Random House, 1971). 8 Guy Debord, Society of the spectacle (Kalamazoo: Black & Red, 2000). 9 A. Aneesh, Virtual migration: The programming of globalization (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006); Alexander Galloway, Gaming: Essays on algorithmic culture (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006).

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David Golumbia, The cultural logic of computation (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2009). James R. Beniger, The control revolution: Technological and economic origins of the information society (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1986); Giles Deleuze, Negotiations (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995). 12 Sheringham, Everyday life, p. 251. 13 Bellos, Georges Perec, p. 238; p. 292. 14 Ibid, p. 199. 15 Ibid, p. 236. 16 Ibid, pp. 282-283. 17 Henri Lefebvre, Critique of Everyday Life (Volume three): From modernity to modernism. Trans. G. Elliot. (London: Verso, 2005); see also Michel de Certeau, The practice of everyday life, Trans. by S. Rendall (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984). 18 Bellos, Georges Perec, p. 29. 19 Ibid, p. 34. 20 Ibid, p. 113. 21 Ibid: cards (p. 113; p. 137; p. 239; p. 282; p. 300; p. 302; p. 344; p. 395; p. 405), jigsaw puzzles (p. 302), Monopoly (p. 91; p. 239; p. 344), Scrabble (p. 239; p. 273; p. 282; p. 290; p. 344; p. 533). 22 Ibid, p. 138. 23 Ibid, p. 137-138. 24 Ibid, p. 138. 25 Ibid, p. 282. 26 Ibid, p. 344. 27 Ibid, p. 248. 28 Ibid, p. 350; p. 405. 29 Ibid, p. 335; p. 408. 30 Perec, Life a user’s manual, p. 467. 31 Bellos, Georges Perec, p. 407. 32 Ibid, p. 344. 33 Sheringham, Everyday life, p. 252. 34 Bellos, Georges Perec, p. 395. 35 Ibid, p. 596. 36 David Bellos, ‘Introduction,’ Georges Perec. the art and craft of approaching your head of department to submit a request for a raise, Trans. David Bellos (London: Vintage, 2011), p. xi-xxi. P xix. 37 Bellos, Georges Perec, p. 255. 38 Ibid, p. 259. 39 Ibid, p. 262. 40 Ibid, p. 409. 41 Perec, Life a user’s manual, p. 484-493. 42 Bellos, Georges Perec, p. 290. 43 Ibid, p. 266. 44 One of Béatrice Briedel’s friends is dispassionately examining an engraving of a bishop playing solitaire in Chapter 6 ‘Servants’ Quarters, 1’ (Perec, 2008, p. 18). 45 Perec, Life a user’s manual, p. 365. 46 Ibid, pp. 30-31. 47 Ibid, p. 399. 48 Ibid, unpaginated preamble; p. 191. 49 Megan. A. Norcia, ‘Puzzling Empire: Early Puzzles and Dissected Maps as Imperial Heuristics,’ Children’s Literature 37 (2009), p. 5. 50 Ibid, p. 21. 51 Ibid, pp. 8-9. 52 Perec, Life a user’s manual, pp. 333-334. 53 Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Coleridge’s Literary Criticism (London: Humphrey Milford, 1921), p. 100. 54 See: ibid, p. 501. 55 Sheringham, Everyday life, p. 258. 56 Ibid, p. 279. 57 Perec, Life a user’s manual, pp. 332-333. 11

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58

Ibid, p. 2. Bellos, Georges Perec, p. 302. 60 Ibid, p. 632. 61 Georges Perec, Interview with Jacqueline Piatier, Le Monde (29 September, 1978). 62 Perec, Life a user’s manual, pp. 226-233. 63 Ibid, p. 500. 59

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Works Cited Aneesh, A. 2006. Virtual migration: The programming of globalization. Durham: Duke University Press. Austen, Jane. 1998. Mansfield Park. Ware: Wordsworth. Bellos, David. 2011. Introduction. To Georges Perec. the art and craft of approaching your head of department to submit a request for a raise (xi-xxi). Trans. David Bellos. London: Vintage. Bellos, David. 1993. Georges Perec: A life in words. Boston: David R. Godine. Beniger, James R. 1986. The control revolution: Technological and economic origins of the information society. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Coleridge, Samuel Taylor. 1921. Coleridge’s Literary Criticism. London: Humphrey Milford. de Certeau, Michel. 1984. The practice of everyday life. Trans. by S. Rendall. Berkeley: University of California Press. Debord, Guy. 2000. Society of the spectacle. Kalamazoo: Black & Red. Deleuze, Giles. 1995. Negotiations. New York: Columbia University Press. Elden, Stuart. 2004. Understanding Henri Lefebvre: Theory and the possible. London: Continuum. Galloway, Alexander 2006. Gaming: Essays on algorithmic culture. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Golumbia, David. 2009. The cultural logic of computation. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Huizinga, Johan. 1955. Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play-Element In Culture. Boston: Beacon Press. Lefebvre, Henri. 1971. Everyday life in the Modern world. Trans. S. Rabvinovich. New York: Harper. Lefebvre, Henri. 1995. Introduction to Modernity: Twelve preludes September 1959-May 1961. Trans. John Moore. London: Verso. Lefebvre, Henri. 2005. Critique of Everyday Life (Volume three): From modernity to modernism.. Trans. G. Elliot. London: Verso. Lusson, Pierre., Perec, Georges., and Jacques Roubaud. 1969. Traité invitant à la découverte de l’art subtil du go. Paris: Christian Bougois. Norcia, Megan. A. 2009. Puzzling Empire: Early Puzzles and Dissected Maps as Imperial Heuristics. Children’s Literature 37, 1-32. Perec, Georges. 1978. Interview with Jacqueline Piatier. Le Monde. 29 September. Perec, Georges. 1988. W or the memory of a childhood. Trans. David Bellos. Boston: David R. Godine. Perec, Georges. 1994. A viod. Trans. Gilbert Adair. London: Harvill. Perec, Georges. 1999. Things: A story of the Sixties & A man asleep. Trans. by David Bellos and Andrew Leak. London: Vintage. Perec, Georges. 2008. Life a user’s manual. Trans. David Bellos. London: Vintage. Perec, Georges. 2011. the art and craft of approaching your head of department to submit a request for a raise. Trans. David Bellos. London: Vintage. Sheringham, Michael. (2000). Attending to the everyday: Blanchot, Lefebvre, Certeau, Perec. French Studies 54(2), 187-199. Sheringham, Michael. (2005). The project and the everyday: Françios Bon’s experiments with attention, in Johnnie Gratton and Michael Sheringham (eds). The Art of the Project: Projects and Experiments in Modern French Culture (pp. 188-203). New York: Berghahn. Sheringham, Michael. (2006). Everyday life: Theories and practices from Surrealism to the present. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Sutton-Smith, Brian. 1997. The Ambiguity of Play. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Touraine, Alain. 1971. The post-industrial society. New York: Random House. Wark, McKenzie. 2006. Gamer Theory. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Wark, McKenzie. 2012. Telethesia: Communication, culture and class. Malden: Polity.

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